I got this working a few years ago on era-appropriate hardware. It was awful -- unstable and crashy. There were glimpses of what they were trying for, but it was painfully obvious they were a long way from even the stability of 7.5. I'm sure it was a tough call, but whoever decided to axe it made the right one. Besides, if it had succeeded, they might not have bought NeXT and we might not have gotten OS X!
I was at WWDC in 1996. Each presentation showing off a new feature of Copeland required booting a custom build of the binary, and even then it was flakey as hell because it didn't implement proper memory protection. I vividly remember getting a sudden realisation that Copeland was never going to ship.
When Apple showed Copland on Computer Chronicles, it was just the Apple guy playing animated mock-up demos and pretending that he was using the computer. I think that shows an incredible lack of confidence, as they weren't even willing to demonstrate the actual OS in a controlled environment. I'm not sure why Computer Chronicles let them get away with this. I would have expected that as a news program, they wouldn't let guests do fake demos. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRKzJMS6Uw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXfsAYUjvms&t=242s
Based on what has been reported, I don’t think it was all that tough a call to axe it. What to do after that has hard but cancelling Copeland was an obvious decision to make.
